When Glenn Clark handed this list to me it came with a warning: “You’re going to upset some people this week” is how he presented the daunting task of naming the Sweet 16 High School Athletes in Baltimore history.

He was right. So many names. So many sports. So many nuances and a complete lack of a “criteria” given the generations and the benefit of a 20-20 hindsight after seeing the further life accomplishments of many local athletes. There were boys and girls, and many athletes who excelled at more than one sport.

A case can be made for hundreds of local jocks over a dozen different sports but this is the best I could do. Feel free to argue amongts yourselves or to give me a hard time in social media. This was a tough, tough list:

I’ve been assigned the duty of compiling our latest edition of WNST’s Sweet 16 list. This one — “the top 16 local athletes who never won a championship but deserved to…” — was so uniquely different that I created my own formula for compiling the relative level of “deserving” and went with it throughout the process.

I awarded points to each candidate based on their longevity/career length, their quality of play and their contribution to the community in terms of charitable/foundation work and their dedication to improving the quality of life for people in their city.

Admittedly, if the formula produced a tie or a close margin, I gave the benefit to the player who contributed the most to the Baltimore community via their civic/charity work.

So…let’s get to it, shall we?

#16 is jockey Rosie Napravnik, who cut her teeth in Maryland as one of the state’s most successful jockeys in the mid 2000’s, leading the local horse racing circuit in victories in 2008 with 101. A winner of 1,689 career races heading into 2014, the only missing ingredient on her outstanding professional career is a victory in a Triple Crown Race. She finished 3rd in the 2013 Preakness aboard Mylute, the highest finish for a female jockey in either the Kentucky Derby, Preakness or Belmont since Julie Krone won the Belmont in 1993. Although not as successful locally as someone like Mario Pino, Napravnik spending a great deal of her childhood in the Baltimore area and later becoming one of the state’s most successful jockeys got her the nod here.